The same line I’d noticed in the exhibition at Eliot&Sprain, ten years ago, when I was twenty-four and lost in the depressive years between Ohne Titel and Accounting for Taste. And then, in Carey’s blocky handwriting, adjacent and in a different color—

Decided to leave it

Nothing more. It seemed that she had done it by accident and later changed her mind. It had been her last sculptural show; after this, she transitioned entirely to performance. One last painterly gesture, I thought. There were probably myriad mistakes in her other sculptures, the kinds that nobody sees except the artist. Yet this was the only one I’d ever noticed. I liked that, intentional or not, she’d left a big one for the road.

After YOKEFELLOWS, I went back in time, paging through CAREY 2 and TOMBSTONE PIZZA. I felt immeasurably calmed by the details, by the evidence of how much work her work required. Mine was overtaking me. Hers did too. I was not alone.

Frequently she was personal and emotional. After a turbulent phone call with a curator, she wrote, “Dan from [redacted] called me an ungrateful bitch today, making me out to be less than nothing. I cried when I hung up. When things like this happen, I see that my role requires me to undertake more emotional and spiritual abuse than everyone else. I don’t think any of us should work with him again and I resent having been put in this position.”

In my own notebooks, I only wrote about people to record my impressions in the moment so I could make the best of a situation, like, “Phone call with Jacqueline Milot. She asked me to pitch her a show and I agreed to send something in the next month. She speaks very quickly, so I think it will be better to exchange over email.” My notebooks were written only for me, and it was fascinating to read through narratives so clearly intended for public consumption. Pine City, I realized, taught Carey how to record her work in the way we did at the Academy, and naturally—she put her own spin on it. I thought too about Jack Wells, and our conversation about the retrospective. He’d insisted there was no way to know what Carey would have consented to, but the notebooks seemed so deliberate to me—they were more than consent. They were very nearly instructions. I thought about Jack’s eye-rolling about his job at the Academy—how secure he was, how successful he’d been, how he graduated from college into a literal boat that kept him above the waterline. Jack might have known Carey, but he couldn’t understand her.